Interestingly, a few hours after the posthuman.blog post circulated on reddit yesterday, the embedded amazon link at the end of the original post was suddenly edited out.
Behind every bot is a shifty motherfucker who has always been a scamming piece of shit.
First they polluted email with spam. Then they polluted search results with SEO. Now they pollute forums with crap like this.
For a brief moment in the 20th century, small pockets of middle-class people in the West forgot this basic fact of the universe, but people the world over still suffered. Leaded gasoline. Big tobacco. Cults. Big oil. Big sugar. Violent ideologies with seven-digit body counts. ...All of this happened while we were enjoying our nice suburban lifestyles where we could "leave our doors unlocked."
It never stopped, but it never started, either. Radium water. Snake oil salesmen. The Claque. Papal indulgences. Debased and shaved coinage. The greatest engineer of the Roman period, Hero of Alexandria, made numerous devices that performed "miracles" so temples could extract donations from visitors. I'm sure if they were around today, those same ancient corrupt priests would be shilling memecoins.
This behaviour isn't even unique to humans.
Ever since the first bacterium with a defective metabolic pathway started taking excess production from its neighbours, there have been cheaters. Ecologists call it the Black Queen hypothesis: if the other guy is left holding the bag, then you can invest more of your own energy into reproducing, until there's no more slack in the carrying capacity. Cheating is literally an evolutionary strategy.
To be part of the world you must be resilient to the evil that is baked into it, even when it comes to your doorstep.
If a platform can't or won't offer the tools to limit abuse, go find or build a new platform that can.
They're among us.